Laboratory for Image Understanding and Earth Observation Sensors (LIMES)

Hardware

In terms of computer equipment, a total of 22 stereo-capable PCs are available, all of which are equipped for photogrammetry and remote sensing tasks.

All workstations are equipped with active LCD stereo viewing and each with an additional at least 19" TFT screen. Each of these stations is equipped with Matlab, AutoCAD and MS Office packages.

For visualisation purposes, a stereo beamer CUBE 3D from Digital Image with a fixed screen (room 2/222) and a portable screen is available. It is used for lectures and exercises as well as for 3D visualisations and animations of various kinds. The observation is done passively with polarization glasses.

In addition, a large number of external USB drives with up to 1TByte storage capacity each are available in the laboratory. A Tablet PC is available for the instructor to supervise exercises. The laboratory has a whiteboard for exercises, meetings and lectures in combination with practical exercises.

Software

For photogrammetric applications 20 Digital Photogrammetric Software Packages from Trimble (INPHO Software) are available. There are 9 full licenses and 11 Educational Package (lite) licenses available:

• Basic software (Applications Master),
• automatic aerotriangulation (MATCH-AT),
• automated generation of digital terrain models (MATCH-T DSM),
• automatic orthophoto production and orthomosaicing (OrthoMaster+OrthoVista),
• semi-automatic building and street detection (inJECT),
• Editing of digital surface models from point clouds (DTMaster Stereo).

Additionally available:

• 2 full licenses for the generation of digital elevation models with a module for automated filtering of laser scan data (SCOP++),
• 15 licences LPS (Hexagon),
• 5 licenses LIS Pro 3D of the company Laserdata.

(Source aerial photo: Trimble GmbH)

Software for close-range photogrammetry

The following software is available especially for close-range photogrammetry:

• 10 licenses of the software Pictran
• 14 Licenses of the Photomodeler software
• 1 license of the software Panoramastudio
• 2 Licenses of the iWitness software
• 3 Educational licenses Agisoft Photoscan

Software for remote sensing

Especially for automated remote sensing the following software is available:

• 15 software packages ErMapper (Hexagon) and student licenses,
• 15 software packages ERDAS (Hexagon) and additional student licenses,
• 2 licenses of the object-based classification software eCognition (Trimble).

Other equipment

A digital reflex camera (Canon), two panorama heads, a UAV PAMS from Germatics GmbH for aerial photography and a Tritop HD industrial measuring system are available for photogrammetric recordings.

2 Festo Robotino Premium research robots were procured in the HFT strategy project "Indoor Navigation and Mapping" and have already been used in teaching. The robots are equipped with 2 Bumblebee stereo cameras, 2 Xsens IMUs, 2Kincect 2.0 and can be controlled via WLAN, or can communicate internally via WLAN. One robot also has a Prime Sense Carmine depth imaging camera available.

As further hardware 2 Google Project Tango Development Kits are available since September 2015 for the 3D acquisition of rooms.